Website dev install¶

The code for the https://hypothes.is/ website and API lives in a Git repo named h. To get this code running in a local development environment the first thing you need to do is install h’s system dependencies.

Installing the system dependencies on Ubuntu¶

This section describes how to install h’s system dependencies on Ubuntu. These steps will also probably work with few or no changes on other versions of Ubuntu, Debian, or other Debian-based GNU/Linux distributions.

Install the following packages:

sudo apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends \
    build-essential \
    git \
    libevent-dev \
    libffi-dev \
    libfontconfig \
    libpq-dev \
    libssl-dev \
    python-dev \
    python-pip

Install node by following the instructions on nodejs.org (the version of the nodejs package in the standard Ubuntu repositories is too old).

Upgrade pip and npm, and install tox and tox-pip-extensions:

sudo pip install -U pip tox tox-pip-extensions
sudo npm install -g npm

Installing the system dependencies on macOS¶

This section describes how to install h’s system dependencies on macOS.

The instructions that follow assume you have previously installed Homebrew.

Install the following packages:

brew install \
    libevent \
    libffi \
    node \
    postgresql \
    python

Note

Unfortunately you need to install the postgresql package, because Homebrew does not currently provide a standalone libpq package.

Upgrade pip and install tox and tox-pip-extensions:

pip install -U pip tox tox-pip-extensions

Getting the h source code from GitHub¶

Use git to download the h source code:

git clone https://github.com/hypothesis/h.git

This will download the code into an h directory in your current working directory.

Change into the h directory from the remainder of the installation process:

cd h

Installing the services¶

h requires the following external services:

PostgreSQL 9.4+
Elasticsearch v6, with the Elasticsearch ICU Analysis plugin
RabbitMQ v3.5+

You can install these services however you want, but the easiest way is by using Docker and Docker Compose. This should work on any operating system that Docker can be installed on:

Install Docker and Docker Compose by following the instructions on the Docker website.
Run Docker Compose:
```
docker-compose up
```
You’ll now have some Docker containers running the PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ, and Elasticsearch services. You should be able to see them by running docker ps. You should also be able to visit your Elasticsearch service by opening http://localhost:9200/ in a browser, and connect to your PostgreSQL by running psql postgresql://postgres@localhost/postgres (if you have psql installed).

Note

If at any point you want to shut the containers down, you can interrupt the docker-compose command. If you want to run the containers in the background, you can run docker-compose up -d.
Create the htest database in the postgres container. This is needed to run the h tests:
```
docker-compose exec postgres psql -U postgres -c "CREATE DATABASE htest;"
```

Tip

You can use Docker Compose image to open a psql shell in your Dockerized database container without having to install psql on your host machine. We’ve provided a shortcut for this in our Makefile, so just run:

make sql

Tip

Use the docker-compose logs command to see what’s going on inside your Docker containers, for example:

docker-compose logs rabbit

For more on how to use Docker and Docker Compose see the Docker website.

Installing the gulp command¶

Install gulp-cli to get the gulp command:

sudo npm install -g gulp-cli

Running h¶

Start a development server:

make dev

The first time you run make dev it might take a while to start because it’ll need to install the application dependencies and build the client assets.

This will start the server on port 5000 (http://localhost:5000), reload the application whenever changes are made to the source code, and restart it should it crash for some reason.

Running h’s tests¶

There are test suites for both the frontend and backend code. To run the complete set of tests, run:

make test

To run the frontend test suite only, run the appropriate test task with gulp. For example:

gulp test

When working on the front-end code, you can run the Karma test runner in auto-watch mode which will re-run the tests whenever a change is made to the source code. To start the test runner in auto-watch mode, run:

gulp test-watch

To run only a subset of tests for front-end code, use the --grep argument or mocha’s .only() modifier.

gulp test-watch --grep <pattern>

Debugging h¶

The pyramid_debugtoolbar package is loaded by default in the development environment. This will provide stack traces for exceptions and allow basic debugging. A more advanced profiler can also be accessed at the /_debug_toolbar path.

http://localhost:5000/_debug_toolbar/

Check out the pyramid_debugtoolbar documentation for information on how to use and configure it.

You can turn on SQL query logging by setting the DEBUG_QUERY environment variable (to any value). Set it to the special value trace to turn on result set logging as well.

Feature flags¶

Features flags allow admins to enable or disable features for certain groups of users. You can enable or disable them from the Administration Dashboard.

To access the Administration Dashboard, you will need to first create a user account in your local instance of H and then give that account admin access rights using H’s command-line tools.

See the Accessing the admin interface documentation for information on how to give the initial user admin rights and access the Administration Dashboard.

Troubleshooting¶

Cannot connect to the Docker daemon¶

If you get an error that looks like this when trying to run docker commands:

Cannot connect to the Docker daemon. Is the docker daemon running on this host?
Error: failed to start containers: postgres

it could be because you don’t have permission to access the Unix socket that the docker daemon is bound to. On some operating systems (e.g. Linux) you need to either:

Take additional steps during Docker installation to give your Unix user access to the Docker daemon’s port (consult the installation instructions for your operating system on the Docker website), or
Prefix all docker commands with sudo.